


until we die

by AStarlightMonbebe



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Angst, Character Analysis, Character Study, Inspired by Excuses (Music Video), Introspection, Open to Interpretation, Parallels, Passively Suicidal Character, Suicidal Thoughts, Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:27:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21912898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AStarlightMonbebe/pseuds/AStarlightMonbebe
Summary: A taxi driver and his passenger cover up a murder.(Time stops moving.)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 12





	until we die

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Kim Feel's 'Excuses' music video; I recommend listening to the song while reading or before reading.
> 
> This is the first time I've been inspired to write kpop fic in about six months...it's been a while, but I feel my writing has at least improved a lot since then. This piece is honestly...I guess you could call it a study? It's inspired by the music video, but also my own interpretation and spin on things...I don't know, but there's a lot there. I'd like to say this fic is also open to your own interpretation of the events/symbolism/ending/characters.
> 
> Unbetaed//but it should be mostly okay (also why is this EXACTLY 3.5k this was unplanned). Please enjoy your read~

The watch was ticking. Chan watched the second hand move past the roman numerals in silence, breath frosting out in front of him in the stillness of the air around him, the sound of the ticking the only sound punctuating the air. The winter led to early dusk, the sky darkening into lightened black velvet as the sun disappearing in streaks of pink.

He looked down the road. Cars zoomed past on the opposite end, but the bus line had stopped running to his current location last year. This road was without movement, devoid of any sign of life except for him, standing silhouetted by the streetlights on either side of him and the lamp next to the downtrodden bus stop canopy. 

It was beginning to snow. Flakes floated down from the sky, softly at first, but it soon began to flurry more steadily. As they caught in his hair and his eyelashes, Chan held out his hand and watched one land on his palm, slowly melting into his skin. It was beautiful in a tranquil and serene way.

He looked down the empty road again, checking his watch absently. His hands were starting to get cold, even the pockets of his cream colored overcoat not doing much for the snowflakes that were now crystallized over his hands. He shoved them in anyways, exhaling out a cloud of smoky air.

The streetlamp flickered. The watch hand ticked. Chan looked at the empty road again with impatience.

A taxi should be coming soon.

— 

The water was crashing beneath him. Jisung watched it blankly, the white capped waves washing over gray rocks darkened by the shadow of approaching night. The water was nothing but a washed out gray colored in the shades of the sky reflected above it, but it looked depthless anyways. 

If he fell, would the pain go away?

Jisung closed his eyes and pictured the water swallowing him alive. He imagined drowning, the surface fading away into darkness before his eyes, the water on all sides. The way everything would slowly become unattached and far away. Pressure on his lungs and his face and his body, crushing his ribs and piercing his heart with bone. 

A truck sped past behind him and Jisung started, heart pounding in his chest, his heart _still_ pounding. He gripped the railing tightly between his hands, slowly leaning down to rest his arms and, then, gingerly, his chin on it as he stared down at the expanse of the river beneath him. 

His body hurt. There was a bruise on his face, the skin scraped red. His lip was bleeding too. Jisung breathed with care, even though the pain in his chest caused small explosions and aches every time he inhaled. His wrist was covered in dried blood, so much that Jisung hadn’t bothered to see if there was serious cuts underneath it or not. His watch face was cracked now, thin cracks spider webbing their way across the glass. It had stopped ticking.

That hurt Jisung more than any of the bruises and hits did.

He sighed and watched how his breath transformed the air in front of him. There were hardly any clouds in the air, just his dissipating breath. There were few stars too, only a couple faintly twinkling ones, none bright enough for Jisung to bother to wish on. Even the moon was hiding itself behind the impending cloak of night. 

It was a lonely night, containing only a lonely boy and his broken body and soul. 

He turned his head away from the waves, watching the speeding cars sweep past with their orange white headlights, illuminating the gently falling snow. He tipped his head back and stuck out his tongue, catching a few snowflakes on it. Normally, this made Jisung happy, but now he could only feel the snowflakes melt away on his tongue and think about how everything fell away eventually.

He let go of the railing, fingers cold and numb from holding on so tightly. Sighing, he shoved them into the pockets of his school jacket, which did little to warm him. He looked down at the ground, at his battered up high tops and the thin layer of snow that was starting to stick to the sidewalk.

He took a step forward and looked back. His shoe, he noticed, had left a footprint amidst the white powder on the asphalt. It was nice, Jisung decided. It made him feel like he was leaving a piece of himself. It made him feel like he was _real_.

Sighing, Jisung shook his head sadly, snow catching on his eyelashes and obscuring his vision for a few moments. He turned away from the footprint and started to trudge down the lonely sidewalk, the water on one side and the quiet road on the other.

The footprint would soon fade away, anyways.

—

His eyes hurt. Minho rubbed at them, checking the time on his watch. It was getting late, the streetlights already shining on the falling snow. He should go home soon—the sleep was dragging at his old body, his bones nothing but frozen cold now—but his shift was a long one and he needed the money.

Sighing, he leaned his head back against the rest on his seat, cupping his hands over his face and letting his breath woosh out in a quiet gasp of air in the coldness of the interior of his taxi. The seats were worn leather, cracked polyester. The heat had slowly filtered out of the car when he had turned it off. Now it was only him, dry hands and chapped lips, worn down jacket and sweater and jeans.

Minho opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling, wondering why he still did this. Why he wore his body to the ground and drove for more than twenty four hours short, skipping meals as time flew while he delivered passenger after passenger who didn’t bother to tip him. Why he still did this, lived through this type of mind numbing existence.

He was tired. 

He could not afford to be tired.

Minho blew on his hands, rubbed them together and wished he could afford driving gloves with their expensive leather and fur lining, but knew it was wishful when he could hardly afford a cup of ramen and the rundown room he rented. He started the car, listening to the rumble of the car carefully to make sure there were no signs of trouble. It was old and beaten down; he didn’t need car trouble on top of everything else. The company would make him pay out of his pocket for it if there was.

Satisfied that everything sounded okay, Minho turned the key and placed his hands on the steering wheel, exhaling again before pulling out of the parking spot he had been resting in for a good hour. He debated turning on the radio, but decided against it. The silence might have been stifling when he sat alone, but now he was surrounded by the hum of the car and the woosh of tires beside him. 

His phone rang. Minho glanced over at where it lay in his cup holder, declining the call with little thought. It was an unrecognizable ID.

He turned his eyes back to the road just in time to register the empty intersection criss crossed with crosswalks, the red light, and the boy in the school uniform walking across it just before Minho hit him.

The tires screeched as Minho slammed on the breaks, hearing the glass crack and a sickening thud on the ground. His head banged into the steering wheel, the car swerving to a stop. His ears rang loudly as the air around him settled, the sound deafening and then there was no sound at all.

Slowly, he raised his head, pressing the palm of his hand to his temple. The windshield contained thin spiderwebbed cracks, and when Minho let his hand drop from his head, he saw the watch face was cracked too, the numbers all blurry through the interface. It appeared that the hands had stopped ticking.

His hand was bleeding, but Minho pushed the door open anyways, stumbling out. He grabbed the hood of the car, pulling himself around it. Through the smoke and haze of snow and golden streetlights, he saw the body of the boy lying splayed across the ground, blood smeared across the ground towards where he lay.

 _God, no, please,_ Minho begged as he walked forward, the world tilting unevenly as he struggled to walk straight. His body was shaking as he dropped the ground next to the boy, dressed in a dark blue school uniform, backpack lying on the ground. His face was bruised and covered in blood that came from his temple, dripping onto the ground next to him. 

Minho held out a shaky finger to his nose, feeling air glide across it, the chest rising and falling weakly. _He’s alive,_ he told himself, _he’s alive._ Minho reached for his phone, only to remember he had left it in the taxi. He stood, dizziness making the world spin with him.

He needed to call an ambulance. He needed to get help. He needed too...Minho winced and held his head between his hands, clutching it as pain exploded across his temples. He couldn’t afford to be in this much pain. How was he supposed to have seen the kid?

He looked around the intersection. The light on the security camera was dim and unblinking, a faded out brokenness. There were no other cars; there was not even the _sound_ of them out here. The sun was setting. Snow was falling. On the ground, it sprinkled over the school boy, layering him in white. It sunk into the blood and disappeared.

If he called a hospital, he’d have to pay for the bills, no matter how expensive they were. The boy’s family might sue him or send him to jail. He would probably get fired for not completing his shift. He already had two strikes for it, and if he didn’t have that, then what was the use of having a cold room that he already could barely afford? Should he just starve?

 _You’re selfish,_ the voice in his head told him and Minho hugged his arms around his chest, rocking back and forth on his heels. 

A hand grabbed his ankle, weak fingers gripping the hem of his jeans.

“Mister…” the boy said hoarsely, looking up through half lidded eyes. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. “Please help me…Mister...” He coughed, a rattling sound, the fingers brushing Minho’s shoe as he slowly lost energy.

Minho’s mind went blank. He stepped backward slowly, shaking the hand off. “I’ll...I’ll get help...I’m sorry—” Breath caught in his throat, he turned, feet carrying him back to the car and its fractured windshield.

And then, hands on the windshield, he saw the silhouette of a walking figure in the darkness, away from the scene of the crime, the accident, hands in pocket. Minho stopped breathing, heart choking him out

He fell in through the opened door and closed it with a shaking hand, breathing erratically. _Oh god oh god oh god._ With shaking hands, he could do nothing but reverse and speed away. _I’ll come back soon,_ he promised.

He didn’t know if it was true.

— 

Jisung stared up at the falling snow, the white flakes against the know pitch black sky. His body was slowly going numb as the exhaust from the taxi faded out in a smoky blue whiteness into the velvet of the aerial world around him. His left eye’s vision was blurry, the world tinged black and white and dark blue as it flickered shut and open again and again. Everything felt far away. _He_ felt far away.

 _Is this how I die?_ he wondered. _Alone? Abandoned?_

He had been waiting for death to claim him, to carry him away in its clutches, for a very long time, but there was a strange misery to dying like this. It was as if Jisung had realized the weight of his existence on the asphalt colored in his blood. Everything was numbing and eye opening all at once, as if he had been swimming underwater and only just now broken the surface.

The world was a wide, wide place. Jisung looked up at the sky and its infiniteness and felt how finite he was. Up there, there were so many stars. An uncountable amount. So many people had told him the stars were spirits, representing each human on earth.

Jisung wondered if his star was up there, somewhere, or if it had already blinked out.

Wanting to die, thinking about dying, were such different things when facing death itself. Jisung could only lie and feel the life slowly bleed out of him. He knew people said you saw your past when you died, but all he could see was the _infinity_ of the sky and the snow slowly covering his body, as if giving him his own burial shroud.

He coughed, chest heaving, and felt blood on his lips. Squeezing his eyes shut, he let out a painful groan, feeling tears gathering at the corners of his eyes. They slid free and down his ear, tangling into his hair. Jisung felt their tracks even after they were gone.

 _I don’t want to die like this_ , he thought, but there was a slow realization sinking into his chest. The thought that he, too, would fade away. That there would be nothing left of him. The proof that Han Jisung had lived would be gone with his final breath.

He started to cry with shuddering sobs that made his whole body ache. He wanted to live. He wanted to live so that he could eat one more convenience store ice cream. He wanted to watch the water under the bridge one more time; he didn’t want today to have been his last time. He wanted to hit back just once. He wanted to watch a movie that came out in a month. He wanted to eat tteokbokki with a friend. He wanted to _make_ a friend. He wanted to wake up the following morning and see a world coated in white. He wanted to build a snowman and make hot chocolate. He wanted to listen to his favorite song in complete silence. He wanted to see the full moon. He wanted to make a wish on a shooting star. He wanted to graduate. He wanted to see the sea. He wanted to breathe in the salt air and feel the beach on his feet. He wanted to walk through neighborhoods and see the bright Christmas lights. He wanted to stay up as the year changed. He wanted to cut class one day. He wanted to run until his lungs burned. He wanted to win something, anything, and feel the exhilaration in his bones. He wanted to write a song. He wanted to see the sun rise and paint it. He wanted to laugh until his stomach hurt.

He wanted to die on a day that he was _happy._

But he was dying now.

—

Hyunjin walked through the snow and into the tunnel, where glowing yellow lights shone off the walls. He was cold, even in his woolen fingerless gloves and fur lined bomber. Everything around him was tinted golden, including himself. For a moment he imagined himself elsewhere, somewhere otherworldly. 

He walked until he reached the end of the tunnel, golden lights behind him and a black sky and snowy night in front of him. There, he stopped, slowly drawing his left hand out of his pocket and pushing back his sleeve to look at the watch that rested there. It was without a crack, but the face of it was stained with dried blood, and the hands ticked at a slow, erratic pace, no longer in sync with one another.

Sighing, Hyunjin carefully took the watch off and slid it into his pocket slowly, the ticking disappearing from the air. He walked on without a pause, out into the blowing snow, and tried not to think about what might have changed if things had been different.

— 

The taxi took longer than expected, the sunset gone by the time Chan waved his air in front of the impending car. It stopped, smoke pouring out from its exhaust pipe into the still night air. Chan opened the passenger door and got in, closing it as quietly as possible. Any noise was too loud in the suffocating silence of the clear night air.

“Take me anywhere,” Chan told the driver quietly, pressing his forehead against the cool pane of the window. He pretended not to notice how the driver tugged his sleeve down over the cracked face of his watch, hiding the blood on his sleeve. He pretended he hadn’t seen the cracked windshield too.

They drove in silence, nothing but the sound of their breathing filling the surface of the car. Chan waited quietly, watching the hands tick by on his watch and the snowfall by outside. It was more than just flurrying now, the roads covered in a thin layer of whiteness, as if the sky was attempting to purify the earth.

The driver coughed, clearing his throat. He turned to look at Chan, letting out a long rasping breath. The car slid to a stop at a red light. 

“Please help me,” he said hoarsely. The light turned green, but the car did not move, the taxi driver staring at Chan with wide, desperate eyes. There was something empty there, as if the light and life had faded away and left nothing but barren bones.

“I was waiting for you to ask,” Chan said, letting his hand fall from the window, the hands of the watch leaving his line of vision. The taxi driver let out a shaky breath. They drove on. Onwards into the night, through empty streets devoid of any sign of life except for the hum of the car and the sound of their exhales and inhales.

They drove until they reached an abandoned intersection. Through the window, Chan watched the disappearing figure of a lone walking man leave a tunnel, dropping something on the sidewalk as the car passed by them. He seemed to go unnoticed to the taxi driver, but Chan rolled the window down, looking back at the ground.

It looked like it had been a watch.

The taxi stopped. The driver got out shakily and Chan followed, crossing across the pavement to where a boy in a school uniform lay in a smear of dark red across the pavement, eyes closed and face tilted up to the falling snow, which had begun to obscure his body from view.

Together, they lifted him up, the taxi driver carrying him on his back as they ran over to the car. Chan opened the back door, helping the driver lay the boy in. Chan ran back and grabbed his backpack from where it lay on the ground, tossing it in as well. He did not know if the boy was breathing or not. He did not want to feel for a pulse.

They got back into the car, the taxi driver closing the door with a slam. There were no words spoken, only a stretching silence. “A hospital,” the taxi driver said quietly. Chan said nothing, looking at the watch on his wrist. Somewhere along their way, the hands had stopped ticking. He didn’t know how he had not noticed.

The car roared to life. They reversed, turning around, away from the snow that was slowly covering the blood that had soaked into the ground. In the backseat, the boy in the school uniform’s head was still turned to the sky, as if he was dreaming of stars and seeing an ink black sky on the back of his eyelids.

Chan closed his eyes, tilting his head against the window pane. He wondered how different things would have been if this was what had actually happened. If the reality had not been a taxi driver had hit a seventeen year old boy and driven away from the crime scene as fear and anxiety had eaten him up inside. If he had not left Han Jisung there to die, buried in the snow at the scene of the crime, becoming nothing but a ghost with only a fading shadow left behind.

If the watches had not stopped working, would things have changed?

He lifted the watch in front of his eyes again, looking at the face of it sadly. The hands were frozen at a time he could never return to. Not now and not then, either. That time, Chan realized, was gone, just like everything else. And this time, the one they were living right now, did not exist at all.

They drove off into the falling snow.

— 

_End._

**Author's Note:**

> I'd love to hear your interpretation of the meaning and thoughts, so feel free to feed me with a comment or kudo. I'm curious about what you might have noticed (since I did write some things intentionally, like the parallels) and any questions!
> 
> Til we meet again *tips hat and exits*


End file.
